By faith Rahab the prostitute escaped the destruction of the disobedient, because she welcomed the spies in peace.
Hebrews 11:31 (NET)
Rahab Took Them In
He got out on a Tuesday and she had the second key cut at the hardware store on the Monday before, so it was on the ring when she picked him up. He’s her sister’s boy. He’s thirty-four.
The lease has a clause in it. The woman on the landing below has said a thing to her in the stairwell, once, not loudly, and has been perfectly civil since, which is worse. Her own record is not clean either and everyone in that building knows the shape of it. Nothing about her makes her the right person to do this and she is doing it anyway.
Rahab was a prostitute, and her trade is printed right beside her name. The spies came to her and she welcomed them, and when the disobedient were killed, she wasn’t.
Think about what she was agreeing to when she opened that door. Two men from the army that was coming for her city, inside her house, with the king’s messengers in the street asking after them. If it had gone the other way she’d have been executed for it, and she knew that standing in the doorway. Hebrews doesn’t call it hospitality. It calls it faith, and it puts it in a chapter with men who were sawn in two.
She had nothing that would have counted as a qualification. Strangers stood at her door, and she brought them in, and the wall her house was built into came down and she was not under it.
I keep a list in my head of people I’d help if things were different, and the difference is always something about them.
He’s in the small room with the boxes still in it. She has not told the woman downstairs and does not intend to. Three weeks in, nothing has happened, which is not the same as nothing going to happen, and she knows the difference better than anybody in that building.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, I’ve been careful about who I let get near me, and I’ve called it discernment a good deal more often than it deserved. Give me Rahab’s kind of door, the one that opens before I know what it’s going to cost me.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
